Author(s)

Khedir A. Almoayidi^1,2

¹Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
²Department of English, Umm Al-Qura University, Mecca, KSA.

To communicate with other people, a person has to select the appropriate words as well as the appropriate speech strategy. One of the strategies is euphemism which is used to minimize any face threatening. The aim of this paper is to shed light on how people use euphemism while communicating with each other. Two Saudi regional dialects were selected to be described on how speakers use euphemism to communicate to talk about death, sex, body parts and bodily functions. The description of the two dialects indicates that the speakers have the same intention of using euphemism to avoid being impolite and too direct when talking about death, sex, body parts and bodily functions. Besides, it is found that speakers of these two dialects are inclined to use some other strategies such as phonemic replacement, compounding, derivation and deletion.

Euphemism, Hijazi Dialect, Speech Strategy, Phonemic Replacement

Almoayidi, K. (2018) Euphemism as a Communicative Tool: A Descriptive Study of Hijazi and Southern Region Dialects Spoken in Saudi Arabia. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 8, 1-8. doi: 10.4236/ojml.2018.81001.